ANNUAL REPORT 2007.
Approved of by the board of our foundation in their meeting of april 12, 2008.
PREFACE
For our foundation 2007 was a very quiet year. Both our director and our secretary were very busy with other projects. One collecting trip was made to France. There are now about 4000 pictures on our website. We purchased a modern digital trinocular and a special camera to make it possible to take pictures of small shells from 2 mm upwards.
Our educational leaflet is available in Dutch, English and French.
As in previous years the foundation is included in the city guide of Utrecht and in the so
called "Kidsgids". Our foundation assisted in writing a section on fossils in a book for children ("Maak indruk op je kinderen"). Our director wrote an article about our collections and musem for the june edition (no. 256) of the magazin "Spirula" of the Dutch Malacological Society. In 2007 there where 4282 visitors on our site, counted by monthly unicity. Emanuel Nervo from Nervo Productions asked our cooperation to make some photographs of shells, which we gladly provided.
We are happy the Dutch Ministry of Finance again gave our foundation the status of organisation for the general benifit (Algemeen Nut Beogende Instelling (ANBI)).
COLLECTIONS
The "Shell of the Year" is Sassia antiqua (size 28 mm) found by Dr. R.Hessel in the Palaeocene (Thanetian)
of the Paris Basin.
On December 31st 2007, there were 54.451 records in our database containing 363.555 specimen.
Compared with 2006 a growth with 994 records and 19.950 specimen. We not only added a lot of records but we also recounted a number of lots that formerly were estimated only. The number of
sites from wich we collected fossil shells is now 472
The effective display area in our 78 showcases amounts to 94 mē,
The storage capacity of our drawers is 336 mē in 3470 drawers.
HOUSING
The foundation is housed in Utrecht in the premises at the Kievitdwarsstraat 15.
The following accommodation is available here:
- a modest laboratory to clean and preserve fossil shells (12,5 mē)
- two rooms for displaying fossil shells (44,8 mē and 7 mē)
- a basement for displaying miscellaneous fossils (43 mē)
- a cellar for storage of surplus shells (6,7 mē)
- a room for displaying recent shells (29,4 mē)
- a small room for storage of materials (4,5 mē)
All in all we now have 148 mē floor space.
EQUIPMENT, FURNITURE AND MATERIALS
An Euromex trinocular with special camera is added to our equipment.
LIBRARY
A small library for naming shells and educational purposes is
available. We can't lend books to the public but give assistance
whenever possible. Our library now contains 1.086 titles (growth 17).
CONTACT
Our foundation can be reached at the following E-mail address:
fossil.shell.museum@xs4all.nl
Our homepage :
http://www.fossilshells.nl/
We still have an option for the sitename internationalshellmuseum.nl
PLANS FOR 2008
We hope to make a collecting trip to France again. We also plan to work on upgrading our website.
